


Five Times Don Doesn't Call His Family

by raucousraven



Category: Numb3rs
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-10
Updated: 2012-07-10
Packaged: 2017-11-09 13:29:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/455971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raucousraven/pseuds/raucousraven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>i. That time he fell out of the tree; he was eleven, the tree was getting creaky, he’d been told.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Don Doesn't Call His Family

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Barkley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkley/gifts).



i.  
That time he fell out of the tree; he was eleven, the tree was getting creaky, he’d been told. His father’s voice had been bemused, his mother’s hands light and warm and very firm on his shoulders. Charlie had looked up, briefly, from his chalk but looked down immediately. Both of them knew Don was beat.

But today he’d gone up anyway, because it was easy, because it was the highest point in the neighbourhood, because while he was up here no one came yelling after him about chores or piano or most of all, math. It had been fine. He’d scrambled up the well-worn tree limbs and sat until the sun moved and his fume passed, and had been coming down to reluctantly plant himself in front of the piano and then. And then he’d had one moment of pure breathless clarity to feel the branch bent too far under his careless weight before the whole thing just went, a terrible chromatic slide, needles and branches and twigs and Don and all. 

Don blinked, shook off the darkness, opened his mouth, lost his nerve. His head thumped back into the scattering of pine needles; above him, the clouds moved silently through a sunlit sky. He was an idiot, but they were family; he didn’t need to call. They would have heard, and they would come. He knew it like the sky was blue. 

ii.  
It hadn’t been Wheeler’s hit out of the park, but Don’s no-look catch had definitely helped seal the deal for the Stockton Rangers’ latest game. Don hadn’t been turning in winning performances lately, balls slipping or bouncing or just plain too fast for his grasp, but today’s play might just be the turn he’d been looking for. Don’s grin lasted through the shower, the changing, the post-mortem (the coaches tipped him respectful nods; Don sat straight and nodded back, and felt like a millionaire), and on into the suddenly celebratory night. 

They all ended up at his place, later, crammed into his tiny basement suite, the sultry night and the sheen of victory bathing everything in alcohol and endorphins. Enveloped in goodwill toward all, Don staggered toward the phone, bent on calling Charlie to see how big a deviation this latest stat had made in his record, but a hand grabbed his hair, landed on his arm and slid down his ribs, and Don laughed and put down the phone.

iii.  
Don’s fourth shot took that sonofabitch right between the shoulders, a perfect shot, dropped him like a rock. Coop was up and over the concrete median before Don could react, tall and broad and mean enough to stop the rest cold. Don, moving to cover his six, spared a glance for his gun, and the body of the first man he’d ever killed. He’d seen lots of guns, and about as many corpses; the grey void where the gasping horror should have been was what finally forced his eyes away. 

Coop came back over, a stranger all in Kevlar and gunmetal grey, dragging keys and knives and Berettas and cocaine along with the approximately 200kg of henchmen he was bullying into the backseat of their truck. Somehow, he found an extra hand to shove Don on the shoulder, eyes neutral, mouthing something that could have been _stand up_ or _good job_ or _fuck off_ , Don wasn’t sure which. He didn’t ask.

Later that morning, released from the communications blackout surrounding ops for the first time in five weeks, Don collapsed on the sofa, looked at the phone, looked at his hand, looked away. He touched his tongue to suddenly bone-dry lips, and tried not to imagine what his father would have to say. Don left his killing hand pressed to the handset all night, so he could pretend he’d been going to call Coop or home or anyone at all. 

iv.  
When Don heard his father’s voice on his answering machine that Sunday he was too frightened to even breathe. He backed very carefully out of the room, and didn’t tell his boss and didn’t yell at Kim and didn’t call and didn’t call. Didn’t call. This worked until Kim handed him the phone at 3:49 PM on a Thursday some weeks later and didn’t say _It’s your father_ until he’d already snapped “Eppes” into the receiver. 

v.  
He can’t. He wants to, but he absolutely can’t.

Don knows that if he calls home, looking for the small intimate normalcies of conversation with his brother and father it will end in screaming fights or broken glass or both. It’s happened before, several times; Charlie talks too much about Mom, Dad doesn’t talk about her at all, both of those attitudes piss Don off no end and yet he can’t find the balance either. Her funeral was a month ago and Don still feels like he’s been torn to shreds. It’s just shreds leading this investigation, meaningless scraps making sense of other meaningless scraps. Scraps and shreds can make no sense of circumstantial evidence across three time zones, two teenagers badly maimed and one child senselessly dead.

Instead, Don takes his sunglasses off and tiredly restrains his habitual spiteful urge to throw the damn things into the Pacific. He trains his eyes above the smog choking the horizon, traces the deeply incongruous blue curve of sky. Such beautiful things don’t belong in his field of vision. If he thinks about it anymore he’ll punch out the next person who looks his way, and Don’s too old and slow and tired to be this much of a danger to everything he loves. 

His mother might have known what to say. He’d call home, but she’s not there to say it. Don takes a deep breath, traces meaningless shapes in the clouds. If he looks hard enough, he might see her face.


End file.
